#30 - Anthropometric's Influence on Biomechanics with Greg Hawthorne, Part 1

FAKTR, spelled F-A-K-T-R, stands for Functional and Kinetic Treatment with Rehabilitation. Over the past decade, this unique approach to treating pain and dysfunction has been utilized by healthcare providers on 6 continents. Serving as a framework that guides clinical decision-making in patient visits around the globe on a daily basis. With this podcast, our goal is simple: to bring the best and brightest in clinical education to the forefront and empower practitioners with cutting-edge, evidence-based content that improves patient outcomes and inspires healthcare providers to continually evolve their approach to treatment. In each episode, we will feature a training or interview with some of the top minds in healthcare in a short format that is easy to consume. to digest with actionable information that you can implement into practice right away. Let's get started. Hi guys, welcome to a new episode of The Factor Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome and thanks for listening. Today we begin a new 2-part training titled Anthropometrics Influence on Biomechanics with Greg Hawthorne. Greg Hawthorne is a licensed athletic trainer and performance coach who has spent time working in the NFL, Division I athletics, with youth athletes, and the armed forces. Greg has training in a variety of courses ranging from respiratory training, acute care, advanced taping techniques, manual therapy, and neurology. Greg believes the body is widely complex, which allows people to move in different ways while achieving similar outcomes. He uses this understanding to look at every person as an n=1 study. In today's episode, we begin looking at the effects of anthropometrics and how it can influence movement and biomechanics. Anthropometrics is defined as the science of measuring the size and proportions of the human body. In epidemiological studies, anthropometry is often used to evaluate disease risk as well as assess body composition changes. Anthropometric measurements can provide valuable information about health and development status, either as standalone or as combined measurements. Now, we all know that each person is an individual and that everyone moves a little bit differently. But how often do you take this into consideration when you're attempting to determine whether or not your patient has quote-unquote normal movement patterns or range of motion? In this 2-part training, we dive into how skeletal structure and position influence the function of muscles and connective tissues. Appreciating how underlying skeletal shapes and measurements affect movement is pivotal to understanding why people move the way they do. And now, let's cue the intro music and get started with today's episode. Today, we're going to go over again kind of anthropometrics influence on biomechanics.

mechanics, and then understanding primarily why people move the way they are a little bit more so. So the reason I thought this was an interesting topic is sometimes we do interventions that work for some people but not for others, yet they may look somewhat similar, but for some reason certain interventions or certain types of things don't work. At the same time, we may have someone who jumps a certain way versus somebody else, or they're good at certain things and not other things, and anthropometrics can help drive this. In regards to helping understand why these things are the way they are. First, just a little bit about me. Again, I'm Greg. I can start off again. I'm a family man primarily. Kids are the most important things to me and my family are most important to me. But on top of that, as a professional, I'm an athletic trainer and performance coach, as well as an adjunct professor in the athletic training department at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. My experiences have been vast in regards to the clients I've worked with. So I've worked National Football League, NFL for several years, worked for Division I athletics for several years. I've worked for the Air Force for 7 years, and now I'm kind of in private practice doing a vast majority kind of education and working with youth athletes, actually primarily with the brick and mortar, and then helping with rehab and physique athletes as well. And you can see, kind of, you can find me at Thrown Training Therapy, mostly educational stuff there. And then One Step Away Athletics is the youth sports that I work with and their page. So from an education background and story, I went to University of Michigan and Michigan State for grad school. The thing about Michigan State is this osteopathic school, and it's very Based on holistic medicine. And so my background is very osteopathic when it comes to kind of how I look at things. On top of that, you can see a bunch of individuals here that have really helped drive my education and help me understand things. But this is just a small list. I like to say it's really kind of this whole idea of everybody I've worked with comes together and kind of puts me who I am. So I learned from everybody, colleagues, experiences I've had, anecdotal. And that's what this presentation is an all-encompassing thing of. I will be upfront about this as well. Bill Hartman, physical therapist out of IFAS University in Indianapolis, Indiana, has strongly actually influenced my thoughts in this particular subject. So I go into a lot of things that he has again had me encouraged to look further into. So before we get moving, let's see what we're going to go over. So one, we're going to talk about how the skeletal biases can influence ranges of motions. All right. How the diaphragm then also influences that biomechanics, and then how these 2 things really in the shape of the body going to drive different performance options. So I'm not going to say it's going to go cleanly and neat like this, where I talk about this subject and that subject and that subject. This all kind of works together, kind of like how the body is, right? There is no individual unit, individual system that does its own thing. They all kind of work together. And so this presentation is going to be similar to that. So before we move on, I do need you to have an insight into kind of how I think. All right. So this— I think this phrase that someone posted somewhere, I don't even know where this came from, but it says you don't have a skeleton inside you. You're a brain. You're inside a skeleton. It's Essentially, you're piloting a bone mech that's using meat armor. And I just think that's a genius way of looking at the body, right? It's just we are— and I will go beyond the brain. I would say we, the brain, kind of the hearts, the lungs, the organs, our vital organs, those are what really matter. Everything else is made to keep those things to survive, right? That's how we've developed. And so when we look at the body and we look at the bones and the structures and the muscles, they're there to serve purpose. They aren't the end-all be-all while the brain and things are. So We'd appreciate that the reason they're there is for these vital organs essentially that we have, and the reason we use them, how we use them, that's going— and the vital organs, what they need, are going to drive many of the movements and actions that occur, and that's going to affect again how biomechanics actually takes place. On top of that, we have to appreciate physics. So as we go into, we have to understand that we are subject to the laws of physics no matter what. We walk here on Earth. There is gravity. That is affecting us. How physics plays, it is a first principle thing. So when one thing— when physics says it does this, we essentially have to assume it does this. Just because we're a human being doesn't change the influence that physics has on us. Obviously, when it comes to biomechanics, we think about force vectors potentially here and things like that. We're not going to go into that too much. There's not going to be any, during this presentation, mathematical equations. All right. This is going to be more of the general concept of understanding of how physics essentially is going to drive certain aspects on our body and how we move based on essentially our physical structures. So as we know, as we have pretty seen before, the body— no individual is the same. No matter how we look at it, things are slightly different. You can see in these pictures, these are human bones. We can see that within the femoral head, there are different angles there. Within the sacrum in the pelvis, look at the acetabulum pointing more forward versus more to the side. So they're anteverted or retroverted. At the same time, look at the angle again of the femoral head. And look at the widths of these pelvises, right? So you can understand that the structure of the bone itself between individuals are going to be different. So therefore, we have to appreciate that these movements that people do are going to be different solely based on the fact that their structure and their bones are put together and looking differently. One thing as we go on, I think you should also pay attention to is we look at these 2 pelvises. So we look at the space here. Between— so if we look here and we look here, we can notice— this is something to keep in mind, I'll probably come back to this— the space. Less space, more space. Retroverted, anteverted. Okay, this is going to play a big role in what I talk about as we move on through this lecture. Just kind of notice that. But look here and see, again, appreciate these things. I'm not going to go solely into— when it comes to— we can all, I think, understand that if someone has really long legs, Right? Their squat is going to require a little bit more forward bend to keep the center of mass over their foot, or an extremely mobile ankle that can dorsiflex, and a foot that can pronate extremely well, right? So we have those understandings, like the lengths are going to change, limb lengths are going to change how someone moves potentially, especially when it comes under loaded positions. Well, I'm going to go a little bit more general. We're going to reach out, we're going to start here with this lecture more about more of the underlying, the really proximal structures and how they're going to drive different biomechanical movements and how they're going to influence us when it comes to movement. So anthropometric differences, we have found out through research. So this article is pretty cool to look at and understanding that we have research that shows that different areas of life, different places in the world are going to have different body structures. Their skeletal structures will trend towards certain positions, certain movements, certain shapes, as we looked at before in this previous picture. So what we can see also is a lot of times The— well, most of the time, almost all the time, the structure of the pelvis is going to mimic the structure of the thorax. So if we look in these top 2, the red and the blue, if we look at the space within the pelvis here, the red is a lot more open versus the blue. We can also see the wide— if you look at the ISA, so we look on the infrapubic angle, sorry. So we look between the ischiums, the red is going to have a lot larger opening than the yellow. So these 2 are going to— I'm going to use these 2 as a primary setup on our base structures. So we have this, if you will, wider opening at the bottom versus this more narrow closed bottom. This also leads to the same idea if we look at the rib cage structure. If we look up here at the first rib, wider on the red, more narrow on the blue, a little bit more AP relatively from a ratio standpoint on the blue. Anterior-posterior, a little bit less on the red. So research has shown that we have these different structures and that again, the thorax is going to mimic the pelvis a lot of the time, almost naturally. Now we also understand that there's sexual dimorphism. So women are going to have relatively wider hips in general than the thorax comparatively. And again, this is more due to the fact that we have to have pregnancies and things like that. But overall, they're still going to have a narrower pelvis, wider opening of the pelvic floor here, so we'll say wide, is going to have a generally relatively larger, wider rib cage, and vice versa down here. So what we're going to look at here also, when it comes down to just overall how the body has things, we can look at— we have again more measurements show that we have what's considered endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph. Don't worry about that so much. But we have these wider rib cage here, this wider opening. We consider like the infrasternal angles, we're going to call this because it's below sternum. And right here, what that entails on top of that is you have less intestine because there's less space than if you were to have a wider rib cage. So what we can look at that is there's more stuff actually inside of you.

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When you have a wider rib cage, or if you're a wider individual based on that previous picture, so the reds, if you will, what this matters is because if we look back at physics as well, Water or fluid in general is incompressible, so you can't really smush fluid. That's not going to go— you can't crush it. And so we have to understand that that is not movable stuff. There's more stuff individual that's not movable. At the same time, they are going to be heavier. If you've ever— so I hunt, I'm in Georgia, and so we do some hunting. Or if you've ever butchered an animal, the limbs from a weight standpoint are minuscule compared to what the actual thoracic cavity is. So we can appreciate that the weights of these internal fluids, internal bodies, are much heavier in these individuals. So as a person, so you have to control those different guts, those— that weight that most of your mass essentially inside of you. And we have to control that. There are no muscles, per— maybe a little bit, but for the most part, the muscles, there's nothing holding those in place. They just kind of slosh around and move in there. So we have to be able to control those forces, and that's going to drive heavily How we move. Again, it's all about protecting those vital organs, the heart and the brain. This is why we have muscles. This is why we have the different ways we move, why we develop the way we are, to protect these things so we can survive. And not just so we can lift heavy weights. All right, that's the one thing we got to understand. So if we were to look at these rib cages, I'm going to stick there, and then we can again extrapolate this out also to the pelvis from that previous study. We're going to look at these things in 2 various ways, a narrow versus wide. If we look at the narrow rib cage, what we have is a longer rib cage relatively. So we could say that rib cage drops further on the torso. And so when it ends, it's a lot closer to the pelvis versus wide, it's the opposite, right? It's going to end up a little higher. There's going to be a lot more space between the pelvis. At the same time, it's narrow in general, right? So it's less narrow. So what— it's less wide. So what does that allow? That allows for different scapular positioning. So if my scapula is On a narrow rib cage, it's going to have more room to wrap around. Where if I have this really wide rib cage, guess what? I can't necessarily wrap around, right? I'm going to be a lot flatter, for example, and we'll have the ribs are going to be pushing back on those scapulas, so they're not going to be able to come forward as much. So they won't be able to, I guess we say, anteverte as much. At the same time, if we look at from a physics standpoint, from constraints, all these ribs, guess what? Ribs are hard, right? They're pretty stiff comparable. to soft tissue or muscle. So you have a lot stiffer constraint in here, a lot narrower cavity in here, and a lot longer cavity, where this one has less constraints for your guts. So your guts are going to sit, have a little bit more room to move. You're going to be wider here, so you have a larger space overall in the thoracic cavity, and again, not as many constraints. So these certain aspects are going to drive movement, essentially our capability to move. So if we look at 2 individuals here, so I went kind of to the extremes. So the guy on the left is wide, and the guy on the right would be considered like a narrow type arthroplastic structure. The individual on the left is also a lot shorter, so disregard that for right now. I'm saying it matters, and we're going to get to that, but understand that this is an extreme. Both of these individuals are very, very tight, so they're athletes. So this guy can snatch This guy plays basketball. So the shorter guy snatches, the taller guy plays basketball. So what that is letting us know, they're generally pretty tight, right? But they're going to move in different ways. I can't expect this individual to look the same as this other person on the right. We can't expect them to do almost any movement similarly. Look how wide the guy's— the gentleman's back is. They both have somewhat of a general V-shape, but much wider up top than down low on the guy on the left compared to the guy on the right. At the same time, we can look at the shape of their— the slope of the shoulders there and overall where their arms lie within their body. So we can look at the scapulas, how they're sitting, and things along those lines. So we can't expect these 2 individuals to move the same solely based on the fact that their physical structures are just different. We can't expect his squat to look like his squat or him to jump. So if we were to go now from a picture standpoint, legit x-rays here, we can see that the differences internally are also there. So if we look at the picture up top, the C, That rib cage is what we say like a narrow rib cage. Look how tight that angle is. Look how small this rib cage— look how long this rib cage goes. We go on the one on the bottom, we go to F. Look how wide this rib cage is. It is very wide. It's much shorter from a space standpoint. Look how much bone is in this. Look how little bone is in this comparably in this whole picture. We can then also look at, like, within this x-ray, the space within. So if we look at this, so this is higher up in the chest cavity. And this is the heart. Very little space between the rib cage and the heart. Very little space there. We go down to this wider individual, a lot more space there. We'll discuss how that kind of happens. A lot more space here, right? So there's more space to move relative to the position here. Now, if we go down a little bit deeper, a little bit lower in the thoracic cavity, and we compare, we have more space anteriorly actually on with this narrow individual on the left side and compared to this side. Right? It's a relative position, so relatively compared to that person. Vice versa, more space posteriorly on the wider individual, less space posteriorly relatively, right? Look how far this wraps around. Again, we go a little bit wider here, we have to go a little bit— we can't go as far here. So if we look at the same time, there will be also in general, we can imagine heart here. So look at the difference between asymmetries from left to right, but we're not going to go into that in this lecture. But we'd appreciate that again, asymmetries from within us are going to drive different movements from one side to the other. So not only Do we expect one side, one person to move differently than the other? We'd almost expect that internally we may have some asymmetries that are there, and that's mainly because we're built differently, like both wide and narrow. If we look at that, the overall space in the pleura, that there is more space on that left side overall versus the right side when it comes to— we got the heart and we got these other things. So we have to appreciate that there's this rotation going on. So if we look at that in general and we look at the wide versus narrow, what you're going to have is you have length. So there's more room for up and down when it comes to a narrow. I have this length, I can move things up and down more because I have more space. I am longer relatively. So if I'm trying to do something, up and down is going to be a pretty good way. Where it comes to a wide, I have a larger relative width than height. So therefore things are going to tend to be moving more side to side. And at the same time now, If we have these constraints from the rib cage themselves, based on physics, we're going to go through the path of least resistance. So all these things literally go to path of least resistance. So we're going to do things that we're naturally good at. So the body tends to like to keep things simple. The body tends to like to conserve energy. So it's going to bias things that it has natural tendency to make it easy. So that's going to be the biases, and that's going to drive movements of activity of certain muscles and movements in certain planes of motion over others and how the strategies that we use to actually move. And this all comes down to understanding that the actual skeleton themselves, like the ribs and the pelvis, are shaped a certain way and based on these constraints are going to drive our movement. And that's heavily based on the diaphragm. If we can see the diaphragm, it connects with the rib cage. We also have the pelvic diaphragm, which we'll get to in a second. But it's just easier to see here how this diaphragm is here and how it's full of all this stuff. So when this guy contracts, all of this stuff has to move. As we inhale, we have certain movements. As we exhale, at the same time. So when we inhale, we tend to expand. As we exhale, we tend to collapse on itself. But path of least resistance, keep that in mind as we move on into this lecture. So as we saw, we had that compression, the movement, the pumping of the diaphragm. So we have that diaphragm, and now we have also these rib biases. As I mentioned before, we're going to go path of least resistance, and the body is going to do what it's best at doing. So if we have a wide individual, what we'll see is within the system itself, so musculature themselves, it's going to change the helical angle. So I have a wider rib cage, as we saw before, certain muscles that run more horizontal are probably leveraged better for function versus muscles that run more vertical because they probably have to run a little bit longer relatively to the other muscles. So the muscle Length-tension muscle relationships are going to slightly change. And this is going to be, again, based on inhalation. We're going to go into this as we go through. And the diaphragm heavily drives this. So if we have a wide individual, we're generally going to have our guts a little bit higher in the body relatively compared to the narrow. We're also going to have essentially the ilia is going to be posteriorly rotated and medially rotated. So we're going to have this, again, this nutation. So if we have nutation of the sacrum, What occurs is if we have a nutation of the sacrum, as the sacrum nutates, the pelvis is going to turn in. So we're going to have this posterior rotated ilia in general, internally rotated ilia as well. And if we look at that previous picture, so I'm going to take you back there just so we can see it. We talked about that space that we have right in here. That's what's occurring. So if I look at this natural skeletal position, someone has this wide position, what we have is a nutated sacrum. The larger space in here. We have these internally rotated ilia, which puts the acetabulum in anteversion. So this is just the skeletal setup, and it's showing that it biases this mutated pelvis. Exhale. And this is essentially a position of exhalation, pelvis position where the narrow is going to be the opposite. Again, as it's closer, we have this general turnout. And this, this is not muscle attack. This is kind of how it's sitting. So again, this is an underlying bias. From the start, just from the shape of the pelvis. If we have this structure that the pelvis is set up in this position, so if you look at a pelvis and it's set up in exhalation on the wide, inhalation on the narrow, essentially what's going on too, we're going to have different biases. We have these horizontal muscles like the transverse abdominis and the internal obliques. They're more horizontally based. If you look at the pictures and look at the structure of theirs, so they're going to have a stronger bias For leverage. They have to be better leverage based on setup. Again, wider you are, it's gonna be, hey, look, we're really good at squeezing you, we're really good at creating this pressure from side to side. Where if we look at the narrow, it's going to be the exact opposite. So it gets higher, gets lower. Next picture is going to show that a little bit more. The ilium is going to be anteriorly rotated, laterally rotated. And again, the chamber's abdominals are going to be more eccentric based on the fact that it's not set up from a structural standpoint to help that, to actually function well. So it's going to be already set up from the get-go to be at a disadvantage. And then where you have the external obliques, they're more vertical. As we can see here in the first picture, that they're more vertical. They're going to be a little bit more leveraged to do so. But with that being said, if we compare the pelvis and the ribs together, the pelvis is a lot sturdier. It's a lot heavier. It's not going to move as easily as we say the rib cage. And we'll look at the infrasternal angle. It's very easy there, less constraints within the infrasternal angle. When we have these positions naturally, so this wide is almost set up to a position of exhaled position. Everything's pulled open, everything's down, the pelvic floor is raised up based on the nutation aspect of things. Now we have this need to inhale, but because our pelvis is stiffer, harder, and it doesn't naturally move as well, we can force it to, but it's going to be easier for me to move my rib cage. And so now in order to inhale, instead of creating essentially a mutated sacrum, as we inhale, the pelvic floor drops. We get the guts— the pelvis has to— I'm going to bring the pelvis up just to make sure we get here so we can see that the pelvis has to open up as we inhale. Things have to drop down since we open the bowl to catch everything. If we can't open this up, so we're naturally biased towards this exhale position, so the bowl top is closed. I need to get air in somehow. And the reason why I can't get it in naturally with that is the guts have to move. I have to get the guts out of the way so I can create a pressure change. And so we'll have this pressure change to breathe in, and I can't go here. So what we have to do is create an opening of the rib cage instead. And so what we get is the internal obliques and transverse abdominis. They're going to pull the rib cage open and widen that ISA. So it's already wide, so it's biased. And now say, because the cartilage and it's not very bony, those muscles now, it's just easier for me to open the rib cage wider to get that breath in. But in doing so, from a constraint standpoint, we have the pelvis, we have the spine, we have the ribs. They're the ones that are going to move the most from an inhalation standpoint. So we're going to have this expansion anteriorly just within that rib cage, where vice versa is going to happen essentially with a narrow. So they have this pelvis that's set up for inhalation. So they're nice and open. Their pelvis is sitting nice and nutated. Everything's retroverted. Everything's dropped into there because, again, sturdy bones, all this other stuff. We have this ISA that's super mobile through the cartilage, and now we have these external obliques with help with exhalation. As I try to exhale, I can't raise my pelvic floor as well, so it's easier for me to just pull my rib cage closed by using the external obliques, which are muscles of exhalation. So it will just pull that rib cage closed. And now that's how we— now it drives an even narrower rib cage. It's going to pull the rib cage down and forward with the external obliques, while the internal obliques, essentially for the wider individual, is going to pull the rib cage up and back. And that just drives a further bias into their current position. But their biases from the start start to drive this. And this is going to influence their range of motion in the end. Now, if we look at again the helical angles of those muscles and understanding how that works, and that's the rib cage, if we go to the pelvis, we can also see a similar effect occurring here. So if we look at the orientations of the muscles of the pelvic floor, the guts are going to sit higher primarily because if we look at the muscles that are more horizontal, so the top of the picture is anterior, the back of the picture is posterior. So that's the sacrum looking at you. We're looking at the pelvis from the bottom. If I have muscles that are Set up for horizontal, they're going to be leveraged to be concentric in a wide. So these guys here are going to be more— this is the anterior pelvic floor. That's going to be concentric, it's going to be on, which is what occurs when we exhale. So when we exhale, the pelvic floor raises, these muscles contract. We're narrow due to this horizontal, they're not going to be as great at it, right? So these muscles again aren't great at it. So we have this anterior descended pelvic floor. So the pelvic floor itself is going to be eccentric, right? It's going to be relaxed, the anterior aspect of it. While vice versa, these very vertical muscles within the tissues, they're going to be much more concentric. So these muscles that are biased this position here are going to drive this closer pelvic position. So this is going to lead a concentric posterior pelvic diaphragm pelvic floor. This leads to nutation. So all these things are common nutation. So all these things lead to a wide being biased towards a position of pelvic nutation or sacral nutation and ilial internal rotation. Or in posterior rotation, where someone who's wide is going to bias these positions. And these are underlying, and these are always present. These structures will not change overall, so they're always going to bias it. It doesn't mean you can't utilize training to drive certain strategies, but these positions are always there, and they're always going to bias that position. If you look at just the bent skeleton that we saw earlier, the pelvis, They were sitting in these mutated positions and can't replace the ligaments naturally. So that's going to occur. So what does that actually mean? So I guess this is where it goes down to this understanding that this bias is going to be present, and now it's going to drive into where we have moves. But again, understanding this diaphragm occurs, it pumps up and down again. So how is this going to play a role into some of the soft tissue aspects of things, and again, how we move? So if we look at Laplace's law, back to physics again, Anything that has a radius that's smaller, so naturally if the radius gets smaller, the pressure becomes larger. So we have stuff inside of us. A narrow individual will have a small radius within that rib cage. So that rib cage is going to be a little bit more narrow, less small. So it has a higher pressure within the body, within the lungs. In order to breathe, we have to create a pressure gradient to breathe, correct? So our diaphragm drops. This decreases the pressure within our chest and allows air to be drawn in. Now, because the pressure is higher, literally just based on Laplace's equation, because that pressure is higher, the diaphragm has to make a further descent to create the appropriate pressure gradient to get an inhale in, to get air in. So if the guts have to go down in order to do that, guess what? It's going to smush that pelvic floor even further down, opening up the top of the pelvis, the pelvic inlet, catching the guts down here. Creating this more eccentric, loose pelvic floor comparably to the top. Comparable to why? Because it has to drop further down. Research also then shows that as it drops further down, if the diaphragm drops low enough, it's going to, instead of raising the rib cage, which it naturally does, like we saw in that video, it's going to close the rib cage. We get the external obliques closing the rib cage. We get this pelvic floor descending, pushing the guts down, creating an eccentric pelvic floor. Then we have now the diaphragm potentially dropping far enough down that we have this pulling of the ribs into this position where we have a tighter pressure here, more internal pressure essentially within those guts, right? Because they had to drop so far down, a large pressure buildup there. And this is all just so we can breathe. The muscles are there to serve a purpose. We're trying to keep the vital organs alive, and breathing is pretty important. So we have this just for breathing. Now, if we also look at the places as well when it comes to soft tissue work or soft tissue properties and how someone utilizes their connective tissue, We can then look at also Laplace's law states that tension in the walls of arteries and veins are classical examples of Laplace's law. Essentially, the law states that for a given internal fluid pressure, the wall tension will be proportional to the radius of the vessel. So what that means is the larger the vessel, the stiffer the walls have to be of that vessel. So that's why arteries are a lot stiffer than capillaries. And so if the arteries weren't stiff enough, they would explode, right, from the pressure. And so, it's not because the Laplace's law isn't because of the arteries, it just explains the principle of how things work. And again, we're these fluid-filled sacs within our guts. And so, we have these tissues within our body. So, someone who's wider individual is going to have this natural tendency to have stiffer tissues overall because that's going to drive based on just general law of Laplace's law. So, we have wider individual who's going to have a general stiffer tissue. Where a narrow is going to generally have less stiff tissue based on their diaphragm positioning. At the same time, their diaphragm on a wide won't have to descend as much because we have more space to go side to side. So they're going to want to open up, let the guts go wide because there's not as many constraints with the rib cage there. So these underlying principles are going to drive these movements in these positions. So overall, if we look at these 2 separate— these 2 basic level archetypes of individuals, essentially we have a narrow and a wide. A narrow is going to have higher relative internal pressures, so increased pressure into the walls. And so in order for them to move in general, they're going to have to wrap their body around it. If they have to— they want to flex, they have to be flexible enough to overcome that pressure internally because the internals aren't moving as much, so their outside organs are constantly stressed. If I blow up a balloon, same idea, that tissue is going to be more stretched than if I didn't have as much air in it. And that's what a person is going to be moving-wise. At the same time, a wide individual is going to have a relative higher wall tension because of this lack of internal pressure, because of the larger fluid inside of them. They just have to be stronger in general to hold everything in. As I mentioned before, they have essentially even more intestines relatively than a narrow individual would have.

That's it for today's episode. Be sure to tune in for episode 31, where we wrap up our training on anthropometrics with part 2 of this series with Greg Hawthorne. We will be discussing how skeletal biases influence available range of motion, how a person's shape can influence their ability to perform a task, and the diaphragm's role in biomechanics. Guys, this information is absolutely fascinating. And I highly recommend you click the link in our show notes to watch the webinar presentation so that you can see the visual piece of this presentation as well. You won't want to miss it. Episode 31 drops in 2 weeks, or 1 week for our Patreon subscribers. In the near future, we're also planning a few special Q&A episodes with our past instructors, so please be sure to click in the Q&A link in our show notes and ask any burning questions you may have. You can subscribe to The Factor Podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or the podcast app that works best for you. Please give us a 5-star rating to help us grow the show. Every little bit helps. And last but certainly not least, be sure to visit the show notes for a link to download the PDF of today's full presentation, as well as learn about any special offers that we featured in today's episode. We'll see you next time. Hey guys, if you like what you heard today, I encourage you to visit our website at factor-store.com. That's spelled F-A-K-T-R hyphen store dot com to find out more information about all that we have to offer. We have a variety of online offerings as well as our hands-on Factor Rehab System course scheduled in cities around the globe. Be sure to also check out our event calendar and bookmark any of these upcoming live webinar dates coming up in the near future so you can join us live. And of course, the biggest compliment we can receive. is for you to help us spread the word to your friends, colleagues, and classmates. You'll find all the important links as well as info about our sponsors in the show notes, so be sure to check those out.